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Itís Time for Black Athletes to Leave White Colleges

This article in The Atlantic by Jemele Hill, with a typical click-bait headline, has generated some reaction, as you might expect. Calling, essentially, for re-segregation is still controversial even if it's increasingly popular. The subhead here encapsulates the piece:

They attract money and attention to the predominantly white universities that showcase them, while HBCUs struggle. What would happen if they collectively decided to go to black schools?

Ms Hill writes,

In the era before big television contracts, HBCUs more or less had a monopoly on black athletes, because there was little money to be made from them. But when college sports became big business, the major sports schools proved to be relentless in recruiting players away from HBCUs. William C. Rhoden, the author of Forty Million Dollar Slaves, an account of how black athletes have historically commanded big audiences but had little true power, places some of the blame for the exodus on the HBCUs themselves, which operated as if they would have a monopoly on black talent forever. “The HBCUs probably felt that racism was so deeply entrenched that white people would never go after black kids en masse,” Rhoden told me recently. “Had HBCUs known then what we all know now, maybe they could have figured out a way to say, ‘How can we, with the window we’ve got left, make a great product, so when white people finally get religion, we’ll still be in a good position?’ ”

Read: The NCAA doesn’t speak for college athletes

The flight of black athletes to majority-white colleges has been devastating to HBCUs. Consider Grambling State, in Louisiana, home of arguably the most storied football program in HBCU history. A 57 percent decrease in state funding over a period of several years had made it difficult for Grambling to maintain its football facilities. In 2013, things got so bad that players—fed up with the school’s dilapidated facilities and the long bus trips to road games, as well as the firing of the coach—staged a boycott that led to them forfeiting a game. Though the walkout prompted Grambling to spend $30,000 on a new weight room, and it has since raised nearly $2 million for upgrades to its Eddie Robinson Stadium, the ordeal was embarrassing for the university.

“We really have to get monetary support in upgrading facilities,” LeVelle Moton told me. “These kids want to know: What does this weight room look like? What does this athletic facility look like? What does this practice facility look like? It’s tough to compete.”

Kayvon Thibodeaux said much the same. “In this day and age, it’s about money,” he told me. “Unless HBCUs upgrade drastically, I don’t know if things will change.”

But what if young black athletes were to force that change?

“NCAA athletics generate billions in profit annually, and Black athletes are the prized workforce,” reads the mission statement of an organization called the Power Moves Initiative. “However, African Americans are not stakeholders at predominantly white universities and corporations that profit from our talent. The system must be disrupted to redirect the stream of wealth.”

Robert Buck, who attended two black colleges (Alabama State and FAMU), got the idea to start the Power Moves Initiative after organizing the 5th Quarter Classic, a now-defunct annual game between HBCUs held in Mobile, Alabama. He saw how the black colleges featured in the classic were generating millions for Mobile, a city that is 50.4 percent black. It bothered Buck that other black athletes were generating such money for predominantly white schools, and that other black communities weren’t receiving the same benefits.

“It’s almost like we were being used,” Buck told me.

OK, I had to stop at Buck's naive gripe.

Ms Hill concludes:

If promising black student athletes chose to attend HBCUs in greater numbers, they would, at a minimum, bring some welcome attention and money to beleaguered black colleges, which invested in black people when there was no athletic profit to reap. More revolutionarily, perhaps they could disrupt the reign of an “amateur” sports system that uses the labor of black folks to make white folks rich.

A lot of the criticism thrown at her accuses her of racism, and it's true she has an obnoxious background, which is why she no longer works at ESPN. Here, though, I think the principal fault is the essential progressive nature of her ideas.

She follows two principal features of progressive ideology: She decries the free market process, and she'd in fact punish the people she'd claim to represent.

(On this second point she's not a hypocrite, though. She really wants to help the HBCUs ["historically black" upper eds], and would sacrifice the careers of a crop of black athletes to do so, including the career of Kayvon Thibodeaux, whose personal story leads her article.)

She's suggesting that since the HBCUs lost their monopoly on black athletes, those black athletes should voluntarily recreate it, as if the money and careers will follow them back to the "dilapidated facilities" found there. She writes:

In a country where the racial wealth gap remains enormous—the median white household has nearly 10 times the wealth of the median black household, and the rate of white homeownership is about 70 percent higher than that of black homeownership—institutions that nurture a black middle class are crucial. And when these institutions are healthy, they bring economic development to the black neighborhoods that surround them.

But she doesn't see the entrepreneurial creativity of HBCUs as positive, even as she cites it:

Today, most blue-chip recruits in football or basketball don’t even consider attending black colleges. This has forced HBCUs to become proficient at identifying and developing diamonds in the rough—prospects who were passed over or jettisoned by bigger programs. “These are guys who were thought to be not big enough or not fast enough,” Buddy Pough, the head football coach at South Carolina State, told me. “Our niche has been that we take the guy that nobody seems to want.”

Might not "developing diamonds in the rough" rebound to the benefit of the black middle class? And what exactly does it say to aspiring black athletes to recommend they attenuate their earnings potential?

It's one thing for a retired hall-of-famer to donate to a school. It's quite another to ask a young no-namer to forego opportunity for a progressive cause.

ďThe interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasnít originally a climate thing at all.... We really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.Ē óSaikat Chakrabarti, then AOC's Chief of Staff, explaining the Green New Deal for the hard of hearing.

"We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them." óCNN's Don Lemon, showing how to stop demonizing people.

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The problem here is that a prospective sports career is a very huge bet for everybody involved. The vast majority of talented high school players never get a free ride college degree and the majority of those that do never get a bid from the NFL (or similar organizations). Even draft picks mostly wash out in the first few years or get career-ending injuries/issues early on.

But for those few who do get the ticket, it's a very big ticket even for a mediocre professional player. Most social science or business admin degree-holders can never hope to make that kind of money.

So, the entire process from grade school on is about making and covering very outlier bets. Bumping up the reputation of a college is pretty far down the list of priorities for these student athletes. Training facilities, media exposure, coaching staff, rankings, and the ease of maintaining eligibility are way ahead.

I think self-segregation is probably ultimately negative but human beings just love it - including human beings who would be appalled to be accused of it in their own lives. In this case, there is no need to look to black colleges for that experience since college and professional sports teams are already largely self-segregated.

Why? Because University of Maryland is greater than so many other schools?

Must have been good enough; I've never had to sleep with the boss to get ahead in my profession.

You're the one looking down on "third-tier schools," not I. So what top-tier school did you attend (doubt you actually graduated from anywhere) that entitles you to diss "third-tier" colleges?

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.This offer VALID in 353433 323126201715 1413ALL 50 states.